Connections/The Bedroom

I'm Jeff Rosenheim, I'm a curator of photographs, and my topic is "The Bedroom."

The bedroom is the most intimate space there is. It's

probably our earliest memory. It's the deep structure in which we

live our life. It's a place of repose and it's a place of

excitement. It's where we share our secrets and where we hide them.

It's tinged with almost every emotion we have.

The poetics of space draws me to period rooms, especially bedrooms. The bed is like a trophy. Someone said to me

and I believe it, that you can imagine someone sleeping in that bed and waking up being blue, in a good sense.

Those rooms' emptiness is part of their beauty. And of course the emptiness is filled by the attention you pay to it. Great artists have always, I think, turned emptiness into somethingness.

I'm taken by Walker Evans's picture of a boarding house that John Cheever, his friend, the writer, was living in right in the middle of the worst parts of the Depression. The bed is sunken, and there's a little bit of light coming through the window, but it's pretty harsh. These guys were broke and trying to survive. Walker Evans did try to get into the inner sanctum of somebody's life.

The picture of Floyd and Allie-May Burroughs's bed is extraordinary for me. It's an iron bed, it's been pulled away from being parallel to the wall, and there's a shotgun sitting on a peg on the wall right above it. It's a perfect, spectrally white space surrounded by raw wood. And I do think about the lives of these individuals.

The bed fits into the narrative. It is about birth. It's where things begin.

And it's also where things end. There's a great

Lee Friedlander photograph of his motel room. He's on the bed and he's looking out across the mattress. What he sees is the television, the altar at the foot of the bed, and on TV is a child and that suggestion about where life comes from.

On the other hand, Mondrian turned, in the '20s, his apartment and studio into a work of art. He painted all the furniture white, he painted the walls gray, and every so often he would paint red cardboard panels and place them around. And the bed, which is this soft organic form in this rectilinear, hard-edged, modernist space, is clearly a prop in a work of art that is his apartment. I cannot imagine sex happening in Mondrian's studio.

Diane Arbus made a picture of a blind couple. You enter the space through the foot of the bed, and at the very end of the bed, in the darkness below this blaze of light that's coming through the window is the couple, looking out at us, unable to see us. The way the bed sits and floats, it's a kind of pool. And there's very little in the bedroom. It deals with issues of tranquility and solitude.

The suggestiveness of intimacies in space makes bedrooms pregnant with emotion and desire, in a word voyeur. We're glancing in at something that's very intimate and private.

Nan Goldin, she's revealing herself in her own bedroom. We feel the beauty of the tension of any sexual relationship, what she called, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency."

There's a whole surrealism around beds. Christian Bérard never got out of bed. He suggested that he could live his entire life in bed.

For me, a bedroom is a dreamscape. It's about the beauty of the flesh and the potential for life. It is tinged with this wonderful thing that artists allow us

which is to enter a space that is hidden and is filled with life.

It's about memory, it's about familiarity. I

have to bring to it the things that I know and feel

the exploration of my own life.